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September 30, 2004

NIOSH Update:

Needs, Avenues for Workplace Violence Prevention and Research to be Strategized at Workshop Sponsored by NIOSH, Partners

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Contact: Fred Blosser (202) 401-3749

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and diverse partners will sponsor a national conference on Nov. 15-17, 2004, in Baltimore, Md., to stimulate strategic research and interventions for preventing workplace violence. Participants will share the latest research findings, identify successful workplace violence prevention strategies, identify barriers and challenges to establishing workplace violence prevention efforts and strategies for overcoming them, identify major research and information dissemination gaps, and explore roles that organizations and agencies can fill in achieving this progress.

Expert panels and working sessions will be organized around four categories of workplace violence: 1) violence associated with criminal intent, 2) customer/client violence, 3) employee-on-employee violence, and 4) violence associated with personal relationships. The discussions will help guide the development of a strategic plan for workplace violence research and prevention.

The conference, "Partnering in Workplace Violence Prevention: Translating Research to Practice," grew from NIOSH discussions with stakeholders on the most important research and prevention needs across diverse work settings and types of workplace violence. Co-sponsors include the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses, the Corporate Alliance to End Partner Violence, the Injury Prevention Research Center at the University of Iowa, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Liz Claiborne, State Farm Insurance, and Verizon Wireless.

"We are pleased to join with these co-sponsors and with other diverse partners to see what strategies have been effective in keeping workplaces free from the risks of homicide and assault, what additional information is needed to improve future efforts, and what steps can be taken to put the results of research into practice to keep employees safe," said NIOSH Director John Howard, M.D.

An average of 1.7 million people were victims of violent crime while working or on duty in the United States, each year from 1993 through 1999, according to a report published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. An estimated 1.3 million (75 percent) of these incidents were simple assaults while an additional 19 percent were aggravated assaults. Of the occupations examined, police officers, corrections officers, and taxi drivers were victimized at the highest rates. For the same time period, over 800 workplace homicides per year were recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries.

NIOSH has worked extensively with partners in industry, labor, government, and academia to identify risk factors for workplace violence, and to develop recommendations for reducing these risks pending additional research to fill gaps in current information. Further information on the conference, including on-line registration, is available at
www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2006-144/. Further information on preventing workplace violence is available on the NIOSH web page at www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/violence/. More information about NIOSH research is available from the toll-free NIOSH information number, 1-800-35-NIOSH (1-800-356-4674).